Robert Best sat down with the two co-founders of Sybil Productions, Vikki Price and Marcus Brown, and one of their actors, Gareth Williams, to discuss The City: Revolution – their first AudieTM.
What is an AudieTM?
Vikki: It’s a movie but without a screen. Actually, we use the infinite screen that’s between your ears, and we project story, characters, images, narration (by Marcus), music, plot lines, and emotions into that space through an immersive sonic experience.
You are operating on a shoestring budget, yet the production quality is superb. How are you managing that?
Marcus: I’ve spent thirty years making music, playing keyboards with Madonna, Seal, and Ozzy, among many others, and some of the music I wrote for myself during lockdown has quite a dark and menacing feel. When Vikki heard it, we wondered about it being a film score, but it soon became clear that the music has the power to be an integral part of a dystopian tale. That’s how The City: Revolution was born. Our home studio is quite basic but I know how to get the most from what we have.
Gareth: I cannot over-emphasise how much we value Marcus’s ears and his decades of skill in playing, recording, and producing.
Vikki: We were initially inspired by Jeff Wayne’s musical interpretation of War of the Worlds, released in 1978. It’s an amazing album and we wondered why it didn’t lead to a whole new genre….now we know! It is challenging today to build the immersive soundscapes we are looking for, even with tech that is nearly fifty years ahead of anything Wayne had.
Tell me about The City: Revolution…
Vikki: It’s a dark dystopian tale which is grounded in today’s reality. I work in human rights, and here we’re asking what’s the worst possible outcome. The financial sector decides it doesn’t need the rest of the country, so the City is walled off to protect assets and resources, and the electricity and other supply lines are cut off to everywhere else. We’re tapping into the anger, frustration, and powerlessness that people in the community feel today, unable to afford a house or a holiday while multi-billionaires do whatever they like.
Marcus: Vikki has such an attention to detail. We spent a few days wandering around the City and it was so interesting to absorb that moneyed vibe down there.
I’ve heard a clip from Episode 1, and now you have Episode 2 in the can, too?
Marcus: Yes. Episode 2 is almost entirely The Whistler character, played by Gareth. That was the first time Vikki and I witnessed one of our characters come to life. We sent him the script, a short brief, and when we heard his recording, we immediately said: “Oh my, that’s exactly the character that we see!” He nailed it first time.
Gareth: Vikki’s scriptwriting includes such brilliant dialogue that I found it relatively easy to get a picture of The Whistler in my own mind. The script reminded me of Jeremy Brett, playing Sherlock Holmes on TV in the Eighties and Nineties. He was a flawed genius, quite manic, and The Whistler flips between sanity and lunacy, sometimes from one sentence to the next. I started with Brett and built from there.
So, what’s next?
Vikki: We exceeded our Kickstarter target, so we can finish The City: Revolution and start to develop some of the other ideas we have, all of which are either dystopian or horror. Give AudiesTM a go and start with ours!
For further information, head to sybilproductions.com.
